The Passing of the Caboose

It struck me the other day that our great national slide into insanity and depression started a ways back, with the decision to drop the caboose from railroad trains.  You wouldn't think everything would hinge on such a decision.  But we know from countless examples how one small thing can lead to incredible consequences.  We can see this fact of existence illustrated on the billiard table, and on the chess board as well.  For some reason the science oriented cable channels are stressing the fact that, even as we speak, some small whack given to an asteroid of relatively modest proportions can lead, in a relatively modest amount of time (when speaking of the universe, if not the human life span), to the end of human life on our planet.  And of course as well as bulls-eyes, we can equally contemplate the near misses which sprinkle through our lives, and through history.  Alice Munro writes a remarkable story in her collection "The Moons of Jupiter" which ends with a bickering couple driving home from a party down a road passing through tall corn fields.  Just as they approach an intersection, a speeding car with no lights passes through the intersection.  The couple finish the ride home in a different frame of mind.  Once Libby and I were driving out of West Virginia and observed, some distance in front of us, a Blazer heading in the opposition direction slide around a curve and off the road, into the guard rail which stopped it's progress from continuing in an arcing descent of probably hundreds of feet into the valley.  Had we been thirty seconds sooner that vehicle would have knocked us over that rail.  As it was, we drove past the Blazer to the sight of several youngish lads sitting stock still and looking straight head out the front windshield in rapt contemplation. 

I think that the vanishing of the caboose may be the harbinger of our current times, unnoticed, unremarked.  Here and there you can find a person who loves the caboose.  Some have been adopted as ready made cabins or storage buildings.  A few can be found in museums.  A great lot of these charming break rooms on the roll have no doubt been scrapped for their metal.  You could be riding in a former caboose, or part of one, just as your wedding ring could possibly be composed of Cleopatra's fillings.  Mostly, the caboose has just vanished.  I watched a coal train pass by a few days ago, some eighty cars, all rolling down to a coal-fired electric generating plant which serves our needs here in Chatham County.  It ended simply with the last of the coal cars.  No jolly red punctuation mark, smoke coming out of its little chimney, or the brief glimpse through a greasy window of overalled men standing around a potbelly with cups of coffee in their gloved hands.  Though I will say that the coal, itself, was on the verge of nostalgia, and probably could I have clambered atop a car and stomped around on top of the coal, the old smell from my days of shovelling coal into the hopper in our basement furnace would have brought back many memories, since even remembering the smell as I write evokes immediately that basement and furnace--the pipes and dials, the red clinkers in the belly of the firebox, the wonderful metal tongs I would use to clean said clinkers away, the big coal shovel, hanging at the ready on the wall, and perhaps best of all, the pictures of dinosaurs which my father had painted onto the coal bin door, without comment.  (And my dad was born on a farm in 1901!)

Sometime in the past, between that coal bin door and this moment writing in the kitchen amidst the peak moment of fall foliage in my woods, some men in suits decided that the caboose was unnecessary.  Little did they know the implications of their seemingly unremarkable decision.  The precipice continues to crumble beneath our feet.

Update.  On the other hand, William Rivers Pitts does have a point:  
http://www.truth-out.org/a-small-fraction-a-man65077

An Ignore Button

Sam Johnson sans KBM cap

Down at the Texaco Bob 2 (he has the UNC Pork Skins ball hat) said the other day that it'd be nice if we all had an "ignore button."  That way, he said, we could just hit the ignore button whenever somebody started talking about global warming or the alleged immorality of the Iraq Adventure, or any of that other stuff that just burns him up.  I guess the deal is, his blood just gets too up when he hears these arguments these days, and he'd like to just turn them off, period.

Kinda seemed like former President Bush has found one of those things, or maybe he always had one?  Back just after 9/11 (our 21st Century Little Big Horn), Bush found the surprising eloquence to remind Americans that the Islamic religion did not plan or execute the attack on the World Trade Centers or the Pentagon.  He correctly pointed out that millions of Americans are Muslims, that they serve with honor in the military, that they are doctors, lawyers, dentists, shopkeepers, working people--that they are just like other Americans.  Some of these Muslim Americans even numbered among the victims of the zelots who crashed the airplanes into the buildings.  Bush's fine statement, stressing our commonality, has been replayed in recent days as part of his many interviews concerning his new memoir, with some interviewers asking him to comment on his own words now--the context being the vicious anti-Muslim rhetoric we've seen and heard in the past few months coming from not only self-promoters like Pam Geller, but from people as central to our political life as Newt Gingrich.  Bush's response to this query has been breathtaking, at least to me.

He pressed the Ignore Button.  This was his own statement, mind you.  He wasn't being asked to comment on someone else's words.  In 2001 Mr, Bush made an essentially moral assertion about how Americans should view the religion of Islam and it's billion or so adherents.  But a few days ago he called a question by Matt Lauer that he simply affirm his own statement a "trick," then added a bunch of arm waving to distract the inattentive listener, ending with "buy my book."  Mr. Lauer looked rather stunned, and for good reason.  How can this be a trick?  If anything, it was an opportunity. 

It seems like too many folks are using the Ignore Button when things come up that might actually cause them to question their own beliefs.  I think it's an indication of our culture's lack of education.  Because an Ignore Button is a concept that was shown to be a fundamental intellectual mistake some years back--like probably by the 1600s or so.  See, there used to be this kinda lame solution to quandaries, which in drama was called Deus Ex Machina.   Such a solution is now considered to be a joke, an irony.  So, for example, Charles Bukowski can end "Post Office" by simply going to the track and winning enough to quit his job and "write this book."  It's a funny solution.

But Bob 2, down at the Texaco, is serious about it.  In his world, putting his hands over his ears means that the world actually shuts up.  And this, to be fancy about it, is solipsism.  To be sure, solipsism has a long tradition.  Bishop Berkeley tried to argue for it, and he's got some serious cred--a lot more than George Bush--amongst the philosophers.  But I'll have to go with Sam Johnson on this.  Bob 2 can push his Ignore Button all he wants, but my guess is, he'll still notice a good kick in the shins.

& The Day After

I am impressed at the spunky reactions from various liberal bloggers, and look forward to Tbogg returning to his blog (versus "twitertwating" as he says he's doing at the moment)--personally, I just do not want to go down the super-phone corridor at all, and I'd probably be cranking the Victrola still if I still lived in that house with that great basement where the Victrola resided back in 1948, with its little stack of classical platters which comprised my dad's entire music collection, carefully purchased after much thought no doubt back in '39, after he'd paid off his '36 Chevy coupe and his lovely brick house with two stories, an attic, and a full basement.  Life under Roosevelt was good if you had a job.

You have to be happy that Reid beat Angle, and Coons beat O'Donnell.  Coons seems like a potentially fine Senator; Reid is at least reasonably sane.  You have to be dismayed at the success of the advertising campaign of outright lies which has been full-tilt on since January 20, '09.  If the Health Care Bill was Obama's "Waterloo", then the efforts to suppress all Democratic attempts at explaining the Bill to the public must be give full credit.  This was out and out thuggery, and it was followed by the rallies in the fall of '09, and of course augmented by the endless day-after-day lies and mischaracterizations of the right wing punditry, not to mention a whole "network" which retains some sort of objective credibility in the face of the obvious distortions it produces daily.  I guess the brilliance of Mr. Murdoch lies in his corralling of the NFL, Major League Baseball, and various other big-time sporting coverages.  Right there he has the male part of the electorate.  If any one still doubts the simple power of advertising to affect election results, check out the example of the three Iowa judges.  That was money, pure and simple--and one focused character with a bent agenda and a willingness to spend. 

The internal contradictions within the Tea Party "organization" may create some digestive discomfort eventually.  For example, their hard-line anti-undocumented persons stand must surely conflict with their claim to want an unintrusive State, because the only way to drive the undocumented either out of the US or into the very grave of poverty is to enforce the necessity of documents at every turn.  Will we all, in a few years, be showing our "papers" at various check points on the way to the grocery store, much less when we happen to cross state lines, or even county lines?  How will that "hopey-changey future" suit ya, Ms Angle?  And as cash money is anonymous, will our new Tea Party State forbid its use in the furtherance of making undocumented life untenable?  That's the direction things are heading.

The same contradiction exists, of course, back at the big turning point for the United States, the Reagan election.  Mr. Reagan was elected a few years after the Supreme Court made it's ruling in Roe V. Wade.  This ruling was a proper Constitutional judgment which asserted that female citizens of the United States had the right to make crucial decisions concerning their health in consult with the medical profession.  Yet since Mr. Reagan placed the Presidency foresquare with the "Right to Life" Movement, the body politic has allowed a kind of Constitutional Black Hole to develop and grow larger and larger, and women's health providers are becoming few an far between, and live in some fear of lynching (see, e.g., the late Dr. Tiller).
The Tea Party view seems to be that even in the extreme cases of rape and incest, lemonade must be made.  What cashes in that "must" but State Power?  Meanwhile, the wedge issue exists to be manipulated, election after election.  Race, the wimmens, teh gays, and the mescans--it's like 'lectricity for agitating that "base."  Works every time apparently. 

Before this brave new world arrives, of course, the Tea Party will have to turn the next few years into a reprise of the Impeachment Circus the Republicans gave us in the mid-'90s, when it was decided that even the Impeachment Process would be enlisted in the on-going political struggle that is our two-party system.  That brilliant move some how inoculated Mr. Bush, or perhaps it is only Democrats who can be impeached.  At any rate, if the Tea Parties have their way, all governance will cease until the Great Issue of the Obama Birth Certificate is decided--which should get them at least to 2012.  And while "Originalists" treat our Constitution as though it were handed down on stone tablets written in fire by the finger of God himself, they also are fine with excising several of the Amendments which were added after the Civil War.  You'd think if they're ok with that concept, they might wonder about doing a bit of carpentry on the Impeachment process, so it can't be misused again.  And there might be some issues to look at re having tiny small population states which can be cheaply bought by anonymous advertising campaigns wield enormous legislative power.  Just sayin'. 

Here in NC, in my Congressional District, we now have a Republican, replacing the long-time Congressman Ethridge. (Update--Ethridge is demanding a recount, so this one isn't decided quite yet.) And in my county, Republicans have swept into the Board of Commissioners.  This should mean renewed efforts to make life inhospitable for our Mexican and Central American residents, as well as a cessation of all attempts to make plans for orderly land development and long-term waste and trash solutions. So, if you happen to want to relocate your Lead Smelting Plant to the sunny South, give Chatham County a look.  We're gonna be open for bidness from now on, and Union Labor is illegal in North Carolina--we have a "Right to Work" law.  Our out-going Commissioners lost by about 1%.  Nationwide, demographics which enabled the so-called "liberal sweep" two years ago were down by several percentage points this time around.   There's a relationship between the Satanic power of advertising and these slack asses who didn't bother to get to the polls.  Just sayin'.

It might also be nice if, one day some day, a few preachers would tell their flocks that the message of Jesus was not that it was ok to lynch people.  That seems to be the message of one Preacher John Jones of Liberty, NC.  Mr. Jones put out flyers on election day telling everyone with a windshield to vote straight ticket Republican because the Democrats were baby killers and socialists, and he suggests that while Hitler killed six million Jews, Obama and the Democrats have killed fifty million babies.  Mr. Jones is no doubt in the lemonade camp with Ms Angle.  Mr. Jones even included his email with his flyer.  If I was an asshole I guess I would include it here in the hope that it would be collected by some bot or other and cause him to be spammed ceaseless.  Fortunately for Mr. Jones, Jesus did not suggest that if your neighbor is an asshole, you should be an asshole right back at him. 

Votin' Day

well the race is on and here comes heartbreak

You have a brief day to vote, if you haven't.  In North Carolina we vote for judges, and they've developed some sort of mathematical computer assisted gizmo (probably using software cobbled from the BCS system of bowl selection) called the instant run-off (since run-offs are expensive, and there are lots of candidate judges that no one knows).  So, have fun with that, but read the instructions. You cannot shotgun-vote, which is counter-intuitive to me anyways  Otherwise, good luck and be a good citizen.  I'm sure you know who I'm voting for.

Some random facts.  Andrew Breitbart is going to be on the ABC news team covering the election this year.  That's it for ABC in my book.  Makes me happy I live in a little shadow spot on the globe where my Dish won't give me local programming.  Also, yesterday Limbaugh revealed his true "reasoning" for being such a determined dick (aside from making millions of dollars)--this election, he said, was an exercise in kicking all the pretty people who ran high school out.  That's what he said.  He used "like" in there somewhere, to show it was a metaphor.  I'm thinking he actually revealed a little of his own psychology.   Pat Buchannan seemed to be hedging his landslide bets a bit last night on Hard Ball, as did Limbaugh yesterday.   After the dust settles, be sure to put a big star on the calendar denoting the day the Tea Party subjects the defense budget to their oh most serious fiscal principles.  And another on the day you predict they start an investigation of Mr. Obama's place of birth.  And let us know which of these future days you predict comes first.

That's about it for the election.  It's up to America to get out and vote.  As for NASCAR, I'm with Charles Pierce.